Head of Social Impact

We are looking for an exceptional leader motivated to join a leading social business in Myanmar that directly serves farmers. Myanmar’s 6+ million smallholder farming households produce over 90 percent of the country’s food and employ a majority of the country’s rural labor force. Yet farmers remain largely underserved by markets and government services and lack practical farm advisory services, finance and affordable farm technologies to grow their enterprises. This is a unique position for an impact-driven professional who is inspired to transform a key sector and make it more prosperous and sustainable.

Candidates must be based in Myanmar to be considered for this role.

Your Mission

As the Head of Social Impact, you will oversee effective evaluations of Proximity’s impact on rural customers, ensuring our products and services are creating significant income gains and increase in farm productivity and providing farmers with necessary resilience and mitigation from climate crisis. You will lead Proximity’s commitment to impact measurement, to better strategize future efforts and accurately represent these findings through dashboards, data analysis and visualizations. You will lead the team to deliver lean, real-time market intelligence surveys to monitor the rapidly changing on-the-ground situation and provide actionable insights to senior management team and internal team leaders. This is not your common monitoring and evaluation position - at times, you act more as an in-house management consultant, working with teams to synthesize business needs into key questions central to strategic decision-making. You will collaborate with leaders to drive incremental changes from a strategic level to an operational level.

The Head of Social Impact will be instrumental in Proximity’s efforts to become an industry leader in impact evaluation. You will bring a wealth of analytical experience and economics and business acumen to our forward-thinking organization. You will be an intellectually curious, tech savvy and a strategic leader with successful management experience.

Once You’re Here, You Will

• Lead and manage a team of 5 to 7 team members, coach them and equip them with effective research skills.

• Work closely with our senior management team and other stakeholders in designing the assessments

• Design and execute timely research studies, from research scoping, methodology design, data collection to analysis. This will include -

  • Refining and implementing data collection methodologies and tools
  • Developing systems and practices to efficiently deliver the results and effectively integrate findings into organizational processes and decision making
  • Converting qualitative and quantitative data into reports and graphics
  • Identifying and collaborating with external research partners when needed

• Spend time talking to farmers and traveling in the field, once circumstances allow, to understand the fast-changing needs of farmers, including the impact of specific products and services. Develop insights and look for opportunities to maximize the impact of our offerings on farm households.

• Effectively communicate (written and orally in English) Proximity’s impact in a well-structured, articulate way to internal and external audiences.

• Engage with Proximity’s investors and partners around our impact measurement strategy and findings.

• Engage with internal stakeholders, from field staff to team leaders, to ensure that they understand the need and importance of impact evaluations and are aware of the impact methodologies

Must-Haves

• Curiosity with a keen ability to relate to farmers, field staff, research associates, managers and senior management and donors/investors
• Excellent communicator who can produce crisp, clear slide decks and present to senior management, donors and internal staff members
• Collaborative leader comfortable managing up, down and laterally and working with cross-functional teams
• Effective manager with the skills to build, coach and lead a team of 5-7 members
• Strong analytical skills with capacity to spot errors in data collected, clean data, index data and analyze data
• Multitasker who can effectively manage several projects at once

Added Bonus

• Myanmar language proficiency
• Background in statistics or economics
• Background in environmental or climate science

In return…

You’ll earn a competitive salary, with medical benefits, and incredible opportunities to develop your career. You can expect an annual impact bonus, an amazing office with the forward-thinking people and world-class training opportunities through Proximity School.

You’ll get to see more of the world, with the potential to attend conferences and events to keep your skills sharp.

And, ultimately, you’ll have the opportunity to change lives in Myanmar for the better, while doing groundbreaking work.

About Proximity

Proximity Designs is tackling globally important issues at the nexus of climate change, deep poverty, food insecurity, inequality and political conflict. We do this by helping hundreds of thousands of rural people care for their soils, grow more food, earn better incomes and build resilience against climate change. We address a critical government and market failure, by designing and delivering products and services needed to make farming families more productive, profitable and environmentally sustainable. We offer our low-income customers a suite of innovative and affordable farm solutions such as micro-irrigation systems, bio-fertilizers and bio-pesticides, soil health testing kits, on-call crop protection services and farm loans.

Over the past 18 years, we’ve generated USD 782 million in additional income for 1.2 million poor farming households across rural Myanmar. With this income increase, farmers can invest in their future: education for their children, more nutritious food, better healthcare and investments in their farms or other village enterprises.

How to Apply

If you are interested in joining us, please click apply to submit your application.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis without regards to race, sex, color, national origin, sexual orientation, age, or marital status, and therefore interested candidates are encouraged to apply.

Please note that only short-listed candidates will be contacted.